Those who criticise Vagina: A Fresh Biography have forgotten that pro-sex data is a vital part of our movement’s historyMany critics and readers, including many feminists, have welcomed my textbook Vagina: A Fresh Biography. Some critics, though – feminists also, of another kind – are accusing me of a form of contemporary heresy.Vagina is an account of the latest neuroscientific and other findings that markedly update our understanding of female sexual desire, arousal and orgasm, at a age when conventional wisdom about female sexual response is arrested in research from Masters and Johnson, decades-ancient; at a age when, much in a hypersexualised society, 30% of American women self-report not reliably having orgasms when they wish to; in a year when 2,000 British women with normal labia requested labiaplasties. Surely reporting on fresh data about female sexual response is an obviously feminist body to do?However these critics’ contention is that this reporting is “essentialism” – that I am re-grounding gender “back” in the body, which is a contemporary feminist-theory sin. To mainstream readers, this argument may seem arcane. So a primer: some contemporary feminist theory’s primary orthodoxy asserts that gender is always, everywhere, entirely “socially constructed” – that is, only absolute in the intellect or in social attitudes.However critics who attack me from this position don’t seem to know how recently their position was made in feminist intellectual history. The “essentialism” versus “gender theory” wars emerged only belatedly, in the 1980s, as legal activists sought to downplay any potential biological differences between women and men in pursuit of equal treatment in the workplace and, elsewhere, academic feminists were inspired by advertise-structuralism to constitute a discipline that cast gender as existing only as a social norm.However the radical fresh findings on which I report have to do with the female body and with female sexual response. The fresh findings are updating our understanding of female pleasure and the intellect-body connection in women on many levels. Some fresh findings are vital for understanding the harm of sex crime more fully, and others have to do with the numbing effects of porn on desire. In a age when porn co-opts young men’s and women’s responses, is it “feminist” to withhold fresh data about its potentially addictive nature and depressive effect on a habituated libido?Should we not know about this data? I come from the feminist college that believes knowledge is ability. Knowing about the science of the brain-vagina connection – a concept that is not my construction however rather an everyday circumstance for the scientists at the forefront of this research – simply method we are willing to engage with the modern earth; the brain-body connection is being thoroughly documented in hundreds of ways, from cardiovascular health research to the role of stress in illness.Problematically for my critics, this textbook is not an belief piece or a polemic; it is mostly a survey of this fresh science. These critics, to truly carry their points, can’t simply attack me – they really demand to capture issue directly with the findings of the dozens of studies that I cite.Their hostility towards looking at any fresh neuroscience of female sexuality and at any data on the intellect-body connection is unsustainable – and will only, as age goes on, constitute some feminist theory seem more and more outside of touch with contemporary human learning.I would affirm, also, that this particular critical attack on Vagina – as somehow abandoning feminism’s “higher agenda” by giving women fresh data about such “trivial” issues as their sexual responses, arousal and orgasm – is remarkably historically shortsighted. I am really standing not in opposition to feminism however squarely in one (temporarily submerged) intellectual tradition, part of a extended tradition of women who saw the empowerment of women as being linked to their having excellent, solid and fearlessly presented data about their sexuality.My critics exhibit some historical amnesia; since a robust feminist tradition of pro-sex data defined a extended tradition of feminism until the 1970s – dating back to 17th-century midwife Jane Sharp and through to Victorian physician Elizabeth Blackwell, motivating contraceptive activists of the 1920s Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, and reaching a high mark in the second wave.In that era, pro-sexual-awareness feminists added the speculum to encounter-collection activities so women could see what they looked like. Germaine Greer looked at biology and culture in The Female Eunuch and insisted, in a 1970 essay, Lady, Like Your Cunt. Judy Chicago made her confrontational Dinner Party – a piece of artwork that represented well-known women in the archetype of various vaginal images. Lesbian activist Tee Corinne made a vagina colouring textbook; Betty Dodson made movies showing various vulvas and teaching women to masturbate; Shere Hite insisted (to familiar howls of outrage) that the Freudian imitation of vaginal intercourse alone was not enough to please two-thirds of women. And a generation of women’s health and sexuality activists made revolutions – from which we still benefit – in sex education, women’s reproductive rights, and access to data about desire and pleasure. Pussy Riot and Lisa Brown of the Michigan state house are surely descendants of this inspiring tradition, which defied ridicule and sometimes prison to empower women sexually.By writing frankly about female desire and bright a blaze on the immediately well-established brain-vagina connection and the fresh science of female pleasure, am I departing from the greatest feminist tradition or honouring it? I believe it is the latter. Perhaps, unlike some of my critics, I have learned to trust my readers. By confronting the body I am not saying women are just the body. Rather I am respecting my readers’ intelligence: some situations are socially constructed, some are biologically based, and my readers are smart enough to assess their earth moment by moment.The feminist mission remains the same, much in the blaze of fresh data about the vagina, female desire and the female brain. Fresh data should not derail us from fighting for a earth in which all individuals are valued equally, and all differences treated with respect. Yet if we are to have intellectual integrity we must not flee from fresh insights however engage with them. I for one prefer to gaze at the fresh evidence directly, not avert my eyes from it – knowing that the truth always empowers – and meanwhile to keep up the age-ancient fight for women’s freedom.FeminismNeuroscienceWomenSex educationSexual healthHealthNaomi Wolfguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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